I didn’t think anything could top not watching the Olympic Games. Those eight or ten or however many days it was, they were blissful. No inane commentating, no up-close-and-personal minibios with sappy sound track, no national anthems, no medal counting and clueless geopolitical speculation – none of that stuff. When it came time to turn on the TV in the evening, it was to watch my favorite current program, Corner Gas, previewed below:

For those of you who have not yet discovered the charm of life in Dog River, Sask., permit me to suggest that you scan your local program guide. My cable brings it to me via WGN in Chicago; there may be other sources as well. This is an ensemble comedy with sharply drawn characters and writing that is always amusing and sometime brilliant. And I may as well come clean right here: I’m madly in love with Nancy Robertson.

But I was saying that didn’t think that anything could be better than skipping the Games. I was wrong. Last week and this week I have been skipping, avoiding, and also ignoring the political conventions. As is the case with most public events, I have discovered that it is a far more efficient use of my time to let them go by and then scan the informed commentary week or two later. In a culture of information overload, and most oddly in one that has come to prize constant connection and instantaneity of delivery, it turns out that time can be the most effective filter one can apply. Just wait. If it was worth knowing about, you’ll know in good time, and if – what is the case more often than not – it wasn’t, you’ll have saved yourself time and tedium.

The first hint I had of this strategy came during the Gulf War, when a few score journalists were equipped with technology enabling them to report directly, not from the front, where they weren’t allowed, but from wherever they happened to be, which often turned out to be a hotel somewhere. An unprecedented ability to inform a nation in “real time” went a-begging because they simply didn’t know what was going on. So they eventually just interviewed each other and swapped rumors and opinions.

A second hint, this one broad enough to serve as a shopping mall parking lot, came in 1994, when the major television networks once again threw their most sophisticated equipment and their top on-air talent into live coverage of an “unfolding” event, this one an hours-long vigil tracing the slow progress of a white SUV along a California freeway. Nothing happened. Vast amounts of information, in the information-science sense of the word, were broadcast without imparting a scintilla of useful knowledge to anyone. Not only that: It was not remotely possible that anything that anyone (apart from the police on the scene) needed to know right then could have happened.

Water coolers are hardly noticed anymore in the workplace, having been shoved aside by vending machines and microwave ovens and such, but once they were one of the proverbial places where citizens gathered to discuss the events of the day, or rather of yesterday. (The corner tavern, before the era of 24-hour-a-day sportschat TV, was another.) Would-be water cooler pundits learned quickly to hedge their prognostications because, unlike professional fortunetellers, they had to show up the next day, face the same audience, and accept the hoots of derision when they were wrong. The TV talking heads and bloggers and their commenters are shielded from this rigor. When they are wrong they have leisure to work out their post hoc justifications, their denials, their counterattacks. Or they simply hide behind anonymity.

Here’s a random example from one of the most respected and widely read blogs around, Glenn Reynolds’ “Instapundit.” On Wednesday of last week, while the Democratic convention was in progress, he noted

“…certainly not a bounce for Obama.”

On Thursday this became

“A BOUNCE FOR OBAMA after all….”

Now, to be fair, Instapundit was just reporting here on what some pollsters had said. But in light of Thursday’s report, who needed to know about Wednesday’s? And, come a month from now, when the two candidates have debated head-to-head and any number of unforeseen events have upset strategists on both sides, who will still feel that he needed to know about either one?

So my advice: Give yourself a break. Not watching breathless TV – what a rush!